USA TODAY Review

In ‘Ruthie Leming,’ the road leads to home

The reaction of readers to The Little Way of Ruthie Leming, the thoughtful and thought-provoking new memoir by Rod Dreher, probably will depend on how far they live from where they grew up, and whether they regret or embrace that closeness or distance.

Like many and perhaps most people in this mobile society of ours, Dreher left home — St. Francisville, a small river town in Louisiana — to make a career for himself, in his case as a journalist and conservative blogger in Washington, D.C., Dallas and Philadelphia. But on visits to St. Francisville during his sister Ruthie's ultimately losing battle with cancer at age 42, Dreher finds himself impressed anew by its emphasis on family ties and the support of friends in times of crisis — so impressed that he ends up relocating his own family there.

In its broadest implications, The Little Way of Ruthie Leming illustrates the conundrum faced by those from rural communities who have felt the pull of home — including the guilt associated with leaving one's parents and siblings behind — as they pursue the economic, intellectual and cultural opportunities available in cities.

In Dreher's case, this tension is embodied in his relationship with his sister, an empathetic and inspiring schoolteacher who, while loved and admired by everyone she knew, judged him harshly for his globe-trotting life, viewing his openness to the world beyond their Louisiana parish more as a fault than a virtue.

In the book's most striking passage, Dreher describes a Christmas visit to St. Francisville in which he and his new wife, Julie, spent all day making a bouillabaisse — a French-style seafood soup —for a family dinner with Ruthie and their parents, and she wouldn't touch it. Instead, Ruthie begins talking about a woman she had run into recently. "She's a good cook," she says. "A good country cook."

At bottom, The Little Way is Dreher's attempt to breach the wall of tension that existed between him and Ruthie — a barrier made insurmountable by her disinclination, especially during her illness, to have "serious" conversations — both before and after her death. She loved him, he asserts, because it was her duty.

But as understanding as she was with others, she was close-minded with her brother, mistaking his intellectual curiosity — and in fact his entire career as a writer — as a form of pretension and, worse, a rejection of her, their family and where they were from. His worst sin was having left home at all.

Dreher comes to share his sister's commitment to rootedness and manages to honor it by a late career choice made possible, ironically, by the Internet. (Bloggers can work from anywhere.) But the option to go home again, as Thomas Wolfe would have pointed out, isn't available to everyone.

Some readers may view Dreher as having surrendered, in the end, to a kind of emotional pressure, even blackmail, with nostalgia at its core. Others will feel he romanticizes small-town life, embodied on the book's jacket by a rocking chair on a porch, in a way that implicitly criticizes the choices of those who left those porches for the streets and skylines of cities.

But he communicates these thoughts and feelings with simplicity, clarity and humility, and he leaves us to draw our own conclusions. We can't expect any more than that.

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